Mon0 on Mon0’s Substack

Re-posting here my response to this comment because I don't understand how substack works: 1) I believe on twitter, I think you are right and there has been no major discussion regarding it. Although I seem to recall some post by Silas Abrahamsen discussing it. 2) I agree, some parts of my post could be nonsense if the small scientific summary I have given turns out to be mistaken. 3) I think the paper you cite casts doubts on Greene’s dual process theory of morality but I am not sure to what extent it falsifies the theory. I found Greene’s response and the adjustments he talks about reasonable. In any case, I don’t have strong epistemic conviction in any new theory when dealing with a phenomenon as complex as human morality. 5) I have seen you raise this objection before but it’s one of the few I don’t understand. Perhaps because of my ignorance in the subject matter. I think we can define moral intuitions as normative thoughts regarding social behavior or something of the sort. I think humans do have these kinds of thoughts. 6) It’s possible that morality is a human invention and entirely culturally learned. Still, it strikes me as somewhat odd that, as social animals, we wouldn’t have broad, species-typical rules for social cooperation (like other animals appear to have). These rules would inform, across cultures, certain shared intuitions about normative standards for how societies function. If I remember correctly, in one of the papers you cite, Machery or Stich report that no human culture lacks the words “good” or “bad,” or normative language more generally. Does this suggest that while morality may not be innate, some form of normativity is? If that’s the case, I’d be inclined to say that it’s linguistically and conceptually useful to redefine morality as the subset of the innate normative domain that governs behavior toward others. But we can also call it something else if the use of the term morality wears too heavy of an academic burden (in the sense that it has always been defined another way).